Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Ian Poulter Continues to Be a D-Bag

At this year's Waste Management Open, I was planning on doing a story on Pat Perez and his assembly line of automobiles he owns. The reason Phoenix is the perfect place to highlight such a story is because Perez lives in the area, and tends to drive a new car to the course everyday. They range from Hummer to Ferrari to 1978 Pontiac, and I was trying to find something to write about that wasn't, "Phil is fat!!!"

When I talked to Perez, he mentioned that Ian Poulter was staying with him that week. I approached Poulter to ask him a few fun questions about the cars, and to put it lightly, got zero response. He looked me up and down and asked who I worked for, and when I told him Yahoo!, he looked like I'd answered "Dinosaur Magazine Weekly." I notched his attitude to a tough day, even if he'd shot something really low, and didn't think much of it.

But as his Twitter battles continue, it's apparent that Ian is just a dick, which is fine, because most athletes are. His latest meltdown with his followers came when he took a five minute airplane ride from a commercial shoot to his house. He tweeted about it, and got a lot of responses from people that were concerned about him taking such transportation for such a short ride, mentioning all the problems it caused to our environment and what a bad example he was setting to all the private airplane riders around the world.

His response -- "Tree huggers stop it your (sic) boring me, I guess i should have set off 5 days ago and gone on my push bike."

Ahh, generalizations. People that think it's ridiculous to take an airplane five minutes + people on Twitter complaining about it = tree huggers.

The problem with responses like this is why guys like Poulter will never totally understand Twitter. See, he is all smiles and fist bumps when people are responding positively, but things work both ways, and when people jump on Poulter, you can see just how insecure he really is. Yes, you took an airplane when most of us cannot, and people are going to be up in arms about it. Maybe instead of calling them names, you could talk about why you did it or who provided the airplane.

Or, you could just be smug, and continue to look like the pouty, frosted-tipped guy you are.

I have no idea what the origin and destination of the flight was or time of day it occurred, but if said flight was west side of Atlanta to the east side during rush hour the five minute flight saved two hours of hydrocarbon emissions while sitting in traffic.

Poulter may very well be an ass hat, but use of an airplane when it's available isn't always the worst option.